Overview of the intellectual production of performance measurement in public management

Abstract

In the context of changes in the public administration that aim to enhance government performance, this paper has the goal to present an overview from intellectual production on the field of performance measurement in public management between 1980 and February of 2013. In order to do it, it was applied a citation/co-citation bibliometric analysis using Sitkis, Netdraw and CiteSpace II softwares. The databases used in this analysis were ISI Web of Science (WoS) — that reflects international research — and SciELO — that reflects Brazilian research. The study in WoS revealed the most important authors, journals, pairs of documents and research institutions. Moreover, the study based on SciELO identified that the literature about this field is dispersal. In general terms, the results show that performance measurement in public management is an emerging field.